Psyche is a modern, adult fairy tale, drenched in powerful imagery, and one of the most fascinating works to come from the pen of Louis Couperus, the Dutch Oscar Wilde and among the greatest writers ever to be born in The Netherlands. Views: 698
With her virtuoso translation, classicist and bestselling author Caroline Alexander brings to life Homer's timeless epic of the Trojan WarComposed around 730 B.C., Homer's Iliad recounts the events of a few momentous weeks in the protracted ten-year way between the invading Achaeans, or Greeks, and the Trojans in their besieged city of Ilion. From the explosive confrontation between Achilles, the greatest warrior at Troy, and Agamemnon, the inept leader of the Greeks, through to its tragic conclusion, The Iliad explores the biding, blighting facts of war.Soldier and civilian, victor and vanquished, hero and coward, men, women, young, old—The Iliad evokes in poignant, searing detail the fate of every life ravaged by the Trojan War. And, as told by Homer, this ancient tale of a particular Bronze Age conflict becomes a sublime and sweeping evocation of the destruction of war throughout the ages.Carved close to the original Greek,... Views: 697
Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.
On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a false alarm, but on his way back to his family, Jay has a car accident and is killed instantly. Dancing back and forth in time and braiding the viewpoints of Jay's wife, brother, and young son, Rufus, Agee creates an overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose. Views: 697
One of Oprah Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2021From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel about a New Mexican family's extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother's house, setting her life on a startling new path.Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby's first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo's mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel's mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn't speaking to; and disapproving Tíve,... Views: 696
These days, Frank McCourt would seem to have cornered the market on lyrical depictions of Celtic poverty. But never fear, Sebastian Barry--the brilliant Irish playwright, poet, and prose-wrangler--is here. His new novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty recounts the odyssey of a small-town innocent, who grows up in circumstances more bucolic, but no less threadbare, than McCourt's. It's clear from the very first paragraph, however, that Barry means to take a wide-angle view of his Irish urchin: "In the middle of the lonesome town, at the back of John Street, in the third house from the end, there is a little room. For this small bracket in the long paragraph of the street's history, it belongs to Eneas McNulty. All about him the century has just begun, a century some of which he will endure, but none of which will belong to him."
Having handily survived his Sligo childhood, Eneas joins the British Army in time for World War I--and upon his return home, finds himself shunned as a collaborator. Tarred with this very Britannic brush, he goes one better and enlists in the Royal Irish Constabulary. Alas, this move only cements his fate as a marked man, and his father is soon issued a warning: "Let your son keep out of Sligo if he wants to keep his ability to walk." With a price on his head, Eneas commences a life of wandering, from Mexico to Africa to Nigeria (which the moonlight, he notices, "brings closer to Ireland.") From time to time he sneaks back to Sligo and is promptly expelled.
In another author's hands, this epic of dislocation could well be a bitter one. Yet the stoical and simple-minded Eneas is surprisingly free of anguish, and even his constant fear "has become something else, could he dare call it strength, a privacy anyhow." And the reader, at least, has the delightful distraction of Barry's prose, in which the occasional Joycean notes are entirely subsumed by the author's own colloquial brilliance. In the end, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is less a novel than an exhibition of bardic fireworks--a latter-day Aeniad that's actually worthy of the name. --James Marcus Views: 695
Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker's eye to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought of persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see. But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels. Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's wisdom. So full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be profitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression. Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who can studiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a stretch from the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds of leagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching breath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge of the Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longinquity, staggers the heart, ages the very heart of us at a view. And how if we manage finally to print one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitary majestic outsider? We may get him into the Book; yet the knowledge we want will not be more present with us than it was when the chapters hung their end over the cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our great lord and master contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of that within Views: 694
Nicholas travels to places far beyond even those he has heard talk of, where friendships old and new are revived; wondrous sights are seen, and a whole new history is revealed. Now he has to make the choice to join in the rebellion or stand by as his world changes yet again.After the interest created by his recently published ebook The Onion Peeler,as promised is the first of two volumes of what the author describes as street poetry,after the style of that great Australian Poet Banjo Paterson. Most of these poems are in a humerous vein and a number are love letters to his beloved City of Nottingham and its people,the remaining poems are a reflection of the darker side of life,human nature,and various events. Views: 694
This is a special short story from the N'Loron Universe. What is that you ask? It's the veil that my Daughter of Ares Chronicles character, Athine, protects. This is the second in a series of free short story e-books. The #2 issue ties in with some of the plots in my current WIP (Cursed Bloods slated for 2014), but anyone should be able to enjoy the short story as stand alone tale.Disaffected Russian oligarchs conspire to overthrow the current government of Russia and a lone sniper travels to the United States. An Army Special Forces officer assigned to the CIA and a Russian intelligence officer begin to find clues that an attempt will be be made on President Putin's life. A raid on an arms and drug smuggling operation in Kyrgyzstan results in the recovery of a small boy that had been abducted from his school in Geneva. As the evidence of the plot begins to mount, the Special Forces officer and the Russian intelligence operative become targets of Russian gang assassins. Views: 694
Adventure? Check. Magic? Check. Sarcasm? You bet.Roguish Never is sure he has hunted down every relic and every clue possible on his quest to finally lift the curse on his blood and hopefully learn his true name.Adventure? Check. Magic? Check. Sarcasm? You bet.Roguish Never is sure he has hunted down every relic and every clue possible on his quest to finally lift the curse on his blood and hopefully learn his true name. However, convincing the wealthy Lord Firmita to part with a map to the sunken city proves to be far more dangerous than he first imagined.Prequel story to The Amber Isle - see how Never meets his enemy Harstas! Views: 693
In Modern American Memoirs, two very discerning writers and readers have selected samples from 35 of the finest memoirs written in this century, including contributions by such diverse writers as Margaret Mead, Malcolm X, Maxine Hong Kingston, Loren Eisely, and Zora Neale Hurston. Chosen for their value as excellent examples of the art of biography as well as for their superb writing, the excerpts present a broad range of American life, and offer vivid insight into the real-life events that shaped their authors. Here, readers can learn about the time when Harry Crews, playing as a boy, fell into a vat of boiling water with a dead hog; Chris Offutt joined the circus and watched a tattooed woman swallow a fluorescent light; and Frank Conroy practiced yo-yo tricks. Views: 692
Smitty is 13. It is the summer when he and his friends enter high school, the time when all the awkwardness of youth begins to shift and all those things that seemed simple are actually complicated. But Smitty is okay. He has his friends on his baseball team, and he and his sort-of girlfriend seem to want to hang out. But then the New Kid hits that homerun and everything changes."The ball seemed to be something other than an object struck by a wooden bat and sent sailing through the air over the park; it was more like a bird, something with an intelligence of its own, or like time itself moving as we stopped to gaze and wonder." That's how Smitty, 13, shortstop turned pitcher, describes the home run that the New Kid hit. Everything, Smitty says, was just fine before that hit. After the hit, his whole world, even the budding romance with Sandy Miller, seems to change, and the changes leave Smitty bewildered.It's a summer in the early 1960s. Smitty and his pals are entering high school. The story examines those changes through the prism of one spectatular baseball hit. It is also a story about kids playing summer baseball, their joy, their youth and friendship. Views: 692
From the winner of the first ever Man Booker International Prize: 'a novelist of dazzling mastery' (Independent)At the centre of young Ismail's world is the unknowable figure of his mother. Naïve and fragile as a paper doll, she is an unlikely presence in her husband's great stone house, with its hidden rooms and infamous dungeon, and is constantly at odds with her wise and thin-lipped mother-in-law. But despite her lightness and unchanging youthful nature, she is not without her own enigmas.Most of all, she fears that her intellectual son – who uses words she doesn't understand, publishes radical poetry, falls in love freely and seems to be renouncing everything she embodies of the old world – will have to exchange her for a superior mother when he becomes a famous writer. Dedicated to the memory of his mother and circling back to his childhood in Albania, The Doll is Ismail Kadare's delicate and disarming tale of home and... Views: 691
